Utilities for Win 7

Folks,

I recently posted about how to set-up my Windows 7 64-bit computer, with good responses, so I will pose another set of questions. A gold star to anyone who gets through this, but I will be brief.

I am racing toward senior status, and because of that have my favorite tools that help me get things done, working most often in command boxes. For 20 years I have moved from machine to machine with those tools following me. But now I am working on a 64 bit machine, and the elderly DOS tools no longer work, even when emulating older operating systems. If anyone has suggestions for replacements, it would be appreciated.

1. Many times a day I used "browse", a tiny utility that would show me the contents of ASCII files. It was wicked-fast, loading only so much as needed to fill the screen. No bells or whistles, only the arrow keys, home, end and escape were used. Anything like that for Windows 7, 64 bit? I now use Notepad, but it loads the whole file and is slow, and I keep waiting for it to reach some memory limit.

2. I cannot locate "grep", "head", "tail" or "wc" utilities for Windows 7 64-bit. I've seen some scattered programs that have some of the abilities and the Find command in Windows, but old habits die hard. What would be great is a GnuWin64, which from the web site seems to be a stalled project.

3. For years I have used Kedit. A really great tool, for one main reason; Kedit allows for vertical, or column, blocking. Want a batch file to process 1000 things? Redirect a directory listing to a *.bat file, block the file dates and size in Kedit and delete those, put a ? in front of the file names, and do a global replace of ? with the process to be done - thirty seconds and done. Kedit is a commercial product, and I will buy a copy of I need to, assuming it works on 64-bit. But perhaps there is an open-source program with that ability, something more intuitive than vi, for example.

Thanks once again!
Randy

1. Notepad++ is a good alternative to Notepad. Its faster than Notepad.
2. You can use Windows port of UnixUtils It contains all the tools you mentioned and more.

No idea about the KEdit alternative.

Thanks for your information, Romeo. After working with it for a few days, the utilities you pointed me to do a great job. The UnixUtils is particularly helpful - I've not had such a complete collection of Unix utilities on a Windows machine.

Thank again for your help,
Randy

You are welcome

Just to wrap up this post, things have settled down, and I am back in business. As I had said, the utilities that were pointed to do a great job. Notepad++ is indeed fast, and a handy editing tool. It keeps multiple tabs open, which is a plus-plus over Notepad. I did purchase Kedit for $129. It works like a charm. The company that sells it is closing down, but I hope someone picks up where they leave off. The ability to do vertical blocking changes the way I work.

Thanks once again for your help,
Randy

Thanks for keeping us updated I hope you are happy with present situation